A C T A U N I V E R S I T A T I S L O D Z I E N S I S
F O L IA LIT T E R A R IA A N G L IC A 5, 2002
S tep h e n Brow n
WHOSE VANITY IS IT ANYWAY? THE END OF POUND’S CANTO LXXXI
The Pisan Cantos are compelling for a num ber of reasons. The Cantos is an epic poem and, it could be argued, the hero of this epic is Ezra Pound. 1945 m arks the gratest crisis in P ound’s life. The Pisan Cantos are a chronicle o f P ound’s m ental life during the summer of this year. In a sense they are the Hell cantos. They are a mosaic of Pound’s reminiscences o f happier times, o f his contem porary experiences, including possibly a m ental and/or physical breakdown, of recent European history and, of course, examples of Pound’s learning. The snippets of learning are used either as parallels for Pound’s emotional life, or as argum ent to back up a contention on a political or historical point.
N on-Poundians m ay be puzzled by the persistency with which Pound critics drag in the poets’ life to illustrate one interpretation or another when writing on The Cantos. This is caused by a failure to recognize the poem as an epic account o f the life of the poet. 1 his essay will attem pt to bring both P ound’s writing and life to bear in an exam ina tion o f the Pisan Cantos and, in particular, in dealing with the m ost quoted passage o f the poem, that which comes at the end of canto LX X X I, som etim es know n as the “ Pull down thy vanity p assage” (520-522/534-536).
F irst of all let us look briefly at what the Pisan Cantos says about P o und’s relationship with the former Italian leader, M ussolini. This issue is raised by the first few lines of the sequence:
T he enorm ous tragedy o f the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders
M anes! M anes was tanned and stuffed, T hus Ben and la Clara a M ilano
by the heels at M ilano
T o put this passage into context we should first glance back to canto X LI, which opens with a reference to P o und’s visit, in Rome, in January 1933, to Mussolini. During the meeting Mussolini, whom Pound rather obsequiously refers to as “ the Boss,” browsed through a copy of A Draft o f X X X Cantos. A pparently in response to a passage of Pound’s colloquialized French or Italian, Mussolini m ade a dismissive remark:
“M a Q uesto,”
said the Boss, “e divertente.” [it is amusing] catching the poin t before the aesthetes had got
there: (XLI 202)
By canto XLI Pound had already spent around two decades on what would be his life’s work, a poem in which one m ay find the intention to encapsulate m uch of hum an history from ancient China, ancient Greece, Rome or Egypt, to twentieth century Europe, including a quest to discover the causes of wars. The secret, and in P ound’s view iniquitous, w orking o f money-dealers, from the Shylock-type to m odern international capitalists and arms m anufacturers become an evil thread th at Pound perceives to be winding its way through history.
Part o f P ound’s aim was what he called, in the 1913 essay “The Serious A rtist,” “ the art of diagnosis and the art of cure” (LE 45). He bielieved himself to be exposing the negative, even cancerous effects o f w hat he called “ Usury: A charge for the use o f purchasing power” (note at end of canto XLV). Indeed canto XLV is a litany of these effects:
W ith usura hath no m an a house o f good stone
with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever m ore o f stale rags (X LV 229)
W hether or not one agrees with P ound’s reading of economics and history it is clear th at he saw his work as m uch m ore im portant than a mere diversion, that the very health o f society was at stake. So it is inexcusable for Pound to have included M ussolini’s rem ark and to have tried to pass it as high praise.
Pound would have seen M ussolini as an exponent o f “ the art of cure,” as a worthwhile force, a constructive force, building a better society in Italy. M ussolini’s m isdem eanours were justified by these ends. W hen M ussolini was executed in April 1945, Pound would have been devastated. Thus his post-war poem begins with a lament for Fascist Italy and for M ussolini in particular. One should be in no doubt as to the regard in which Pound held Mussolini. Through the ideogrammic m ethod the first few lines of the Pisan Cantos compare M ussolini to the third century
Persian sage M anes, to Dionysus, and there is subsequently an implicit com parison with Christ. Pound’s Italian dream had turned to tragedy, but there is little sign of regret. Rather Mussolini becomes the archetypal dead hero, or the dead bullock eaten by the “m aggots” , specifically by the partisans, but m ore generally by all his enemies, including the Allies. It should be remembered that M ussolini s enemies were also P ou nd ’s enemies.
Tow ards the end of the war Pound wrote two cantos in Italian that were to become cantos LXXII and LXXIII. These had been expurgated from all collected editions of cantos, apparently because of their fascist content, and were printed in England by Faber for the first time in their rightful place in the 1994 edition o f The Cantos. They were printed in America for the first time in the mid-1980’s. M y references to the text from canto LXXIV on also include page numbers for the 1994 Faber edition.
It is still widely believed that the Pisan Cantos were composed in their entirety whilst Pound was in the custody o f the U.S. Arm y at Pisa, either in the small iron cage where he was held for six weeks, or in the prison’s medical tent.
In a recent article Ronald Bush has dem onstrated that two m ore Italian cantos were written by Pound during the final days of the war at Rapallo. These, Bush shows, became a kind of early draft for the Pisan Cantos, and English phrases found in the latter can be traced back to their counterparts in Italian, written whilst the war was still raging (Bush 1995, 69-89). Tim Redm an relates the opinion o f Pound’s daughter, M ary, that unpublished notebooks suggest parts of the Pisan Cantos were written in the m onths preceding Pound’s arrest in M ay 1945 (Redm an 1991, 194).
In December 1944 M ussolini m ade a public speech calling for one last counterattack, a last great effort to turn round the fading fortunes of the Axis powers, and the Fascists. Bush implies that P ound’s writing, during this winter, of the Italian drafts o f the Pisan Cantos was his response to this call by il Duce. Redm an believes Pound was reacting to the m istaken newspaper reports of the destruction o f Sigismundo M alatesta’s temple in Rim ini by Allied Bombers (R edm an 1991, 261). A ccording to Bush, elements such as the recurrence o f disembodied eyes in P ound’s Pisan tent, the young girl “la scalza” whose presence sparks a visionary m om ent, the various attendants to the ancient gods (Dryads, H am adryads) and the historical female figures like Cunizza and Isotta, have been anticipated by the m anuscript versions.
All this suggests th at the Pisan Cantos were a continuation of P o u nd’s w ork during the previous m onths, and that he did not begin from scratch. The eyes, belonging to female acquaintances, or to Cunizza, or A phrodite, had also appeared to Pound at R apallo and m aybe even in Rom e, from where he had broadcast speeches on Italian State Radio between 1941 and
1943. The location that Pound m entions several times in the Pisan Cantos, “ al triedro,” at the three-way crossroads, may well be found at Rapallo. The vital point is m ade by Bush himself when he says that Pound calls upon these encounters with mythological or historical characters “ to justify a jeremiad against his accusers and the m odern w orld” (Bush 1995, 75). Pound was lining up these and all the other characters of the Pisan pageant to stand behind him in an attem pt at self-justification and accusation. His world had fallen apart, his cause was defeated, and he sought someone or something to blame.
1 he principle tactic that Pound employed was resurrecting, and recruiting to his cause, legendary characters and dead Fascists soldiers. In canto LXXII the ghost o f the former leader of the Italian Futurist m ovem ent, and ardent Fascist, Filippo Tom m aso M arinetti, appears and asks if he can borrow P o und’s body in order to continue the fight. M arinetti had died in December 1944, shortly before Pound began canto LX XII. Six m onths before P o und ’s im prisonm ent in Pisa, he gives M arinetti the disembodied voice to say:
V oglio il tuo corpo, con cui potrei ancora combaterre.
P want your body, with which I could still m ake war.] (LXX II 425)
and also to cry:
N o i tornerremo! [We will return!]
N oi tornerremo! [WE will return!] (LXXII 427)
A few pages later the various generals who had served in the Italian army are celebrated.
W ith a characteristic defiance Pound, who had been indicted for treason the previous year, describes the signing o f the armistice of Castille between the Allies and the Italian government on 3 September 1943, as “il tradim ento” : “ the treason” (LXXII 425). Tow ards the end o f canto LXXII Pound resurrects the thirteenth century Italian tyrant Ezzelino da R om ano, a m an whose name was synonymous with cruelty. He allows Ezzelino to justify himself and to attack his biographer’s disparaging portrayal. M assimo Bacigalupo detected P ound’s strategy when he stated:
Ezzelino’s defence o f his occasional violence sounds very much like an ap ology for EP him self (Bacigalupo 1991, 14).
The other Italian canto, LX X III, is narrated for the m ost part by the thirteenth century poet G uido Cavalcanti. Cavalcanti tells of his meeting with the spirit of a young peasant girl, “una contadinella,” who had been raped by some Canadian soldiers and then led another group o f C anadians
on to a mine field, and to their deaths. She is celebrated as a fine little girl, “ che brava pupetta!” , and Pound leaves us in no doubt about his attitude tow ards the scene:
Pound had read the story on the front page o f the newspaper Corriere Della Sera in October 1944. Although Redman finds “nothing . . . particularly shocking” in the Italian Cantos, the above passage m ay be added to the beginning o f canto XLI as episode that will disconcert m ost readers (Redman 1991, 270). It m ust also be held in the mind when one reads the well-known passage at the end of canto LXXXI which has become re presentative of the tone of the Pisan Cantos.
Peter D ’Epiro has shown that the traditional interpretation o f the end o f canto LXXXI views the passage as either a sort of confessional lam ent for P o und’s own past errors, or as a general m onitory address to all men (D ’Epiro 1984, 247-248). The passage, written around eight m onths after the Italian cantos, begins by reaffirming the validity of P ound’s convictions:
W hat thou lovest well remains (LX X X I 520/534).
W hat Pound loved well included the Fascist ideology as well as his family and acquaintances.
Pound was already old, as he told M arinetti’s shade the previous winter (LXX II 425), when he sat in the Pisan prison, “in the halls o f hell” (LXXXI 521/535) and conjured up his lost companions as well as rem nants o f his favourite literature as consolation. But a few lines later a new note enters the poem:
The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull dow n thy vanity . . . (L X X X I 521/535)
M any have read this passage as a lam ent for P ound’s own errors, as a recognition of his own catastrophic mistake. It is as if Pound had come through the hell o f the prison camp to a realization o f his own failures as a m an. Along with m om ents o f irrational joy Pound chronicled his deep despair throughout the Pisan sequence:
That from the gales o f death (L X X X 513/527)
the loneliness o f death came up on me
(at 3 P.M ., for an instant) (L X X X II 527/541) Che splendore!
A ll’ inferno ’1 nemico, furon venti morti.
[What splendour!] [The enemy blown to hell,]
[Twenty were dead.] (LX X III 434)
I here is no doubt that Pound may have been close to losing his mind in the dreadful circumstances of the summer o f 1945. C anto LXXXII suggests as much:
W hen the mind swings by a grass-blade
an ant’s forefoot shall save you (LX X X II I 533/547)
He also took great consolation in watching small creatures like ants, wasps, and crickets, in observing the sunset and in studying the stars. O ut o f such experiences, it is often suggested, a new element of self-awareness and self-criticism emerges. Ernest R enan’s remarks on the imprisoned Christ m ay be considered here:
T he man w h o sacrifices his repose, and all the legitimate rewards o f life, to a great idea, always experiences a m om ent o f sad revulsion when the image o f death presents itself to him for the first time, and seeks to persuade him that everything is vanity (Renan 1889, 218).
And indeed, on at least two occasions we find Pound looking back on his life with some regret and a sad revulsion:
J’ai eu pitié des autres
probablem ent pas assez, and at m om ents that suited m y own convenience (LX X V I 460/474)
and again later:
Tard, très tard je t’ai connue, la Tristesse,
I have been hard as youth sixty years. (L X X X 513/527)
A nd if Pound did not quite have pity for others he does have some now for himself:
A s a lone ant from a broken ant-hill
from the wreckage o f Europe, ego scriptor. (LXXVI 458/472)
The “lone an t” carries us back to the “vanity” passage and the m etaphor of the ant conceiving of himself as a centaur. This would lead us to believe that the ant s vanity is Ezra Pound’s (as scriptor). Thus the whole passage m ay be an attack on his own lack of self-awareness. But this reading is not sustained by the subsequent lines. It is never m ade clear who P o un d’s target is.
Indeed if one were to turn to canto LXXVII one m ay find more candidates. There Pound blames the fall o f M ussolini’s government on the “jactancy” , “peculation” and, m ore im portantly for our discussion, the vanity o f its members rather than anything inherently wrong with the ideology o f Fascism (LXXVII 470/484). So the vanity in question, which
should be pulled down, may belong to the corrupt ministers of the form er Fascist government.
One should also consider the tone in which the passage is written. The insistent cry o f “ Pull down thy vanity,” and the sermonizing o f “M aster thyself, then others shall thee beare,” and the verbal assault, “T hou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,” suggest Ezzelino’s tirade in canto LXXII rather than a lament for past errors (LXXXI 521/535). Pound dem onstrates in these lines a “self-protective hostility” (Bush 1995, 81). Thus the attack is directed towards all P ound’s enemies, but especially the Allies and those he lambasted in the broadcasts and also in the Italian cantos:
R oosevelt, Churchill and Eden
bastards and small Jews G luttons and liars all. (LX X III 432)
and those he named “hoi b arbaroi,” or barbarians (LXXVI 459/473). There is indeed textual evidence to suggest that Pound had not given up w hat he called his dream o f a new republic, or “To build the city of D ioce” (LXXIV 425/439).
Five pages into the Pisan sequence one finds the dateline: “Pisa, in the 23rd year o f the effort in sight of the tower” (LXXIV 430/444). The year 1945 was the twenty-third anniversary o f the Fascists coming to power. L ater in canto LXXIV we find a line that echoes m uch of w hat can be read in the war-time broadcasts: “ and the only people who did anything o f any interest were H., M. . . (LXXIV 436/450); the “H „ M .” being o f course Hitler and Mussolini. On 28 M ay 1942 Pound m ade a broadcast, addressing the Allies, which contained the following line: “A nd every act you commit is committed in H O M A G E to M ussolini and H itler.”
As if to confirm this reading Ronald Bush has discovered, from a study o f the m anuscripts, th at the first lines of the Pisan Cantos, those quoted earlier, which attem pt to apotheosize Mussolini, were, in fact, am ong the last lines to be inserted into the poem while Poud was still at Pisa. They would have been inserted into canto LXXIV around the start o f Novem ber 1945, after the “vanity” passage had been written and just before Pound was taken to W ashington to stand trial for treason. So the glaring question remains: If Pound was still an unrepentant supporter of M ussolini, how could he have considered his own war-time activities to have been vain? The last lines o f the canto tell us that Pound did not intend to criticize his own actions. The tone changes to become m ore sympathetic. The visit th at Pound, Yeats, and several other poets m ade to Wilfred Scawen Blunt in January 1914, alluded to here, is a synecdoche for P o und’s past, and he is quite certain: “This is not vanity” (LXXXI 536/522).
There is, then, a double shift of tone in the last few pages o f canto LX X X I. First o f all we have the declaration o f faith in P o u nd ’s own past
deeds and beliefs: “W hat thou lov’st well is thy true heritage” (LXXXI 521/535). Ih e n the onslaught against the vanity of the opponents o f Mussolini, who embodied P o und’s dream of a new order, and also against Pound’s own captors. The lines, “T hou art a beaten dog beneath the hail, / A swollen magpie in a fitful sun, / H alf black half white” (LXXXI 521/535), reminds one o f the frequent references to the multi-racial character o f the Am erican army and specifically o f the guards at the prison camp.
R athe to destroy, niggard in charity” (LXXXI 521/535), echoes the fear expressed in the previous canto that the Allies m ight have bombed Siena: “ and I trust they have not destroyed the / old theatre” (LXXX 496/510). So although the tone changes again in the last few lines to one of celebration:
T o have gathered from the air a live tradition (LX X X I 522/536)
the tenor o f the passage remains consistent. Pound, the passage tells us, has stored up a “true heritage,” and what he “loved well cannot be reft from ” him, although he has been “reft” from his family and friends. The ant-like Allies, although they m arch into his beloved Italy, and have (so he thought) bombed the Temple at Rimini, which he had celebrated as early as canto IX, though they have overthrown the governm ent and society th at Pound had so m uch hope for, still he can console himself in highlighting the vanity o f all their efforts. Thus Pound com pares their “m an-m ade” successes with nature:
Learn o f the green world w hat can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry. (L X X X I 521/535)
echoing his indictment o f usury in canto XLV: “with usura, sin against n atu re” (229).
The tirade reaches a crescendo, with Pound’s opponents given no respite:
H ow m ean thy hates
fostered in falsity. (L X X X I 521/535)
As we discover from the final lines o f the canto, Pound him self has n ot been in error:
Here error is all in the n ot done
all in the diffidence that faltered . . . (LX X X I 522/536)
and if Pound had been diffident, even now, the implication is th at the poem itself would have faltered.
I write all this at the risk o f seeming to want to put Pound on trial. Nevertheless it is im portant, I believe, not to gloss over the distasteful
aspects o f The Cantos. Hut P ound’s generosity toward other artists during his time in London and Paris cannot be denied. N or can one deny the iact th at the Allies committed what could be called crimes against art and hum anity during W orld W ar II. The m etam orphosis of D resden into Phlegethon, the river o f fire in Hades, in canto LXXV (450/464), is a stark rem inder of this fact. N or can one deny the m om ents of genuine em otion and imagistic beauty that Pound manages to extract from his dire cricum- stances.
Pound drew inspiration from the poet-soldiers of medieval Provence and from the tyrannical art patrons of the Italian Renaissance and was draw n to tough, masculine artists and philosophers like G audier, Hulm e and Lewis. He was obviously attracted by w hat Yeats called “the antithetical se lf . the presence of opposite tendencies in one personality. And it was Yeats who once said of Pound: “Here is a m an who produces the m ost distinguished of work yet in his behavior is the m ost undistinguished of m en ” (Heymann 1976, 56).
We should not attem pt to m ake a saint of Pound. His less palatable side gives The Cantos an extra dimension. We could not and should not imagine The Cantos written by a Pound who left Italy for his hom eland a t the outbreak of the war or who, like Lewis, retracted his support for the totalitarianism of Hitler, or who stayed silent during and after the war. The Pound of the Pisan C antos would have considered such alternatives to be “the diffidence that faltered” (LXXXI 522/536).
I he Italian film director Gilo Pontecorvo, who ironically was a Jewish partisan com m ander during the war, and who m ay well have been in M ilan when M ussolini was strung up by the heels, once said:
[T]o m ake an epic film you can be very wrong about the idea behind the film, but you m ust believe it strongly. Then m aybe you will com municate. ( Times L iterary Supplem ent June 26 1998, 20)
W hether or not Pound was correct in his interpretation of history and politics, he certainly believed firmly in his own ideas. His defiance continued after M ussolini was defeated, after he himself was arrested and incarcerated, even after he had spent some time in a mental hospital. Pound dem onstrated his defiant nature early on by attem pting to write an epic poem in the twentieth century. A part from anything else The Cantos stands as a monument to the strength o f P ound’s own convictions, and single-mindedness. The ugliness and the beauty are complementary elements o f that m onum ent.
Departm ent o f Studies in English D ram a and Poetry University o f Ł ódź
W ORKS CITED
B acigalupo, M . “Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73: A n Annotated Translation.” Paideum a 20 (Spring/Fall 1991): 9-2 9 . (From which 1 take my translations o f the Italian Cantos). Bush, R. “M odernism , Fascism, and the C om position o f Ezra Pound’s Pisan C an tos.”
M odernism /M odernity 2.3 (1995): 69-89.
D ’Epiro, P. “ Pull D ow n W hose Vanity?” Paideuma 13 (1984): 247-252. Heym ann, D . Ezra Pound: The L ast Rower. London: Faber, 1976. Pound, E. The Cantos. London: Faber, 1975/1994.
Redm an, T. Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge Studies in Am erican Literature and Culture, 1991.
